but i don't know who you are
by The Peace
Summary: Five people Walter thought he wanted, and one he didn't notice until it was too late. [Walter/Alice, Walter/Pat, Walter/Faith, Walter/Ken, Walter/Paul, Walter/Una]


Because _subtext_; on the other hand, no power on this Earth can ever convince me that Walter and Una weren't meant2b, if it weren't for all that pesky war business.

Notes 'n' junk: Patrick Brewster and the girl at the end of that section are from "The Cheated Child" in _The Blythes Are Quoted_. And the title is from "Nothing Without You" by (who else) Vienna Teng.

* * *

**but i don't know who you are**

_1. Alice Parker_

Walter looks fondly on Alice Parker from the moment she smiles at him instead of mocking his name. A small thing, perhaps, but confessions have been made and houses built on less. And how wonderful it is to feel that he can protect someone - for he has always been the one needing protecting. Alice looks at him as though he is a soldier and a hero, and Walter never quite forgets that.

She makes his voice stick in his throat and he finds himself following her with his eyes. He wants to memorize everything about her - the gold of her hair and the soft blue of her eyes, write it down for safekeeping, so that even if she goes away - as people are wont to do - she won't ever be lost to him.

They grow closer and apart, the rhythm like a pulse - months away from Lowbridge and he's caught up in others, then he returns and she's too lovely to ignore. He escorts her to dances and walks her home from church; people talk of how well they look together and he thinks perhaps maybe they are meant to be, the way people are in books.

They sit on the sands one night, Alice dragging her fingers through the grains. They should not really be out here alone - no one would ever think ill of his intent nor of her character, but even so. Walter doesn't want to leave, though - there is a rightness to this moment that feels fragile and precarious - he doesn't want to ruin it. Alice still thinks so highly of him, somehow, even as the nicknames and taunts make their way out of the Glen St. Mary schoolhouse and up the harbor. She must know that she can do better.

But she doesn't seem to mind, covering his hand with her own - his heart beats a little too fast - and resting her golden head on his shoulder, briefly. He turns to look down and her mouth is so close to his, pink and full-lipped and he would like very much to kiss her - but then, he always wants what he shouldn't.

Alice makes the decision for him. She turns to look up and him and she smiles, then kisses him on the cheek - she knows better than to kiss (_really_ kiss) a boy alone on the sand dunes.

The next spring, a boy from over-harbor begins to walk her home from prayer-meeting, and fighting has never been Walter's way. He's surprised - for as fast as his heart beat with her, letting her go hurts so little.

_2. Pat Brewster_

Patrick - Pat, as he likes to be called and as only Walter ever calls him - Brewster is a few years younger, but he follows Walter everywhere, when Walter manages to come out to Charlottetown and later the farm. They _know_ each other, somehow, from the start, in a way that makes the grown-ups uneasy and gossipy around their kitchen tables.

"Something not right about those two," one of the women down the road says one day, passing by them as they are reading together in the yard. It stings, but Walter has been gossiped about before, and it has stopped bothering him. Much. Pat bumps a friendly ankle against his, and Walter stops minding anything for a while.

One afternoon, it rains as they linger in the meadow. They are older now - Pat still in the gangly awkwardness of youth, Walter only nearly grown out of it - and they are quite alone, people hurrying inside to escape the damp and cold. They will have go in soon, too, before they are soaked through. Already their hair is plastered to their foreheads, shirts sticking to skin.

He does not know whether Pat has been thinking about this for some time, or if it is on impulse - Walter knows that _he_ thought about it - sometimes - too often, thoughts that were better pushed to the back of his mind. He does not know if it is the rain or Pat's mouth that is freezing against his own, but then it must be the rain, for Pat's lips grow quite warm under his.

They don't talk about it much, the next few times Walter visits him, only take each other's hands and go off to the meadow and that world that belongs only to them, where no one else can follow.

Then there is the summer where Pat grows taller and even more handsome than before. Their last summer. They lie together in the grass - silently, nowadays, no longer weaving fancies. Walter's head feels a mess, these days - Pat and Alice and Faith and Pat, all tangled up in his head and his heart, and he tries to steady himself by the rise and fall of Pat's chest as he breathes.

When he visits again, Pat has grown out of his sentiments, it seems - Walter doesn't know her name, but he has seen her countless times. She has grown from a saucy child to a bold young lady, small and bright-eyed. She sees him from across the road and sticks her tongue out at him, as always. She and Pat are childhood friends, everybody knows - except Walter, for Pat has never so much as mentioned this girl to him.

Pat sees him, too, and looks at him with something like longing, but Walter does not forget, and he is not ready to forgive.

_3. Faith Meredith_

It was doomed from the start, really. Her sight sets on Jem and never leaves, and Walter knows - he _knows_, but it doesn't stop the wanting. (Does it ever?)

She drags him out into the world, out of where he is comfortable, makes him feel as though he is raw and new. He wants to make her smile at him, be brave and strong and right for her. But he's not, he knows he isn't, so he only looks away when she sits next to Jem. Di curls up next to him and gives his arm a little shake, and he tries to smile.

Walter breaks two pencils writing poems to her. Then he burns the papers, finding some dramatic satisfaction in seeing the paper blacken and curl at the edges before it turns to ash. It's all foolishness, and painful besides - but maybe love is supposed to be painful. Certainly it is in his books; love ends in burned kingdoms and graves side-by-side.

He mentions as much at breakfast one day, and Mother sighs and Dad laughs and Susan makes him swallow castor oil for fear that his morbidity is a symptom of some other malady.

They meet in Rainbow Valley, and it is just the two of them - Jem is too old for such childish imaginings, now, and Walter tries not to be glad of that. Faith laughs when she's with him, swings her legs and loops their arms together - friendly, always friendly. It would be easier, really, if she never looked at him twice - but she looks at him over and over again, smiles and kisses his cheek once, because he is like a brother to her - _will_ be a brother to her, for it's an inevitability that she and Jem will always be _she and Jem_.

It shifts, slowly, and he becomes used to it - a flash of longing when she sits near him, a skip of his heart when she smiles. He is a poet and she is his muse, fickle and never belonging to him - that is what he tells himself, anyway. It eases the sting, a bit. Maybe it will even fade, one day.

_4. Ken Ford_

Ken doesn't seem to think about it much, doesn't mind when they brush hands or hold each other's gaze for too long. Maybe things are different in the city. Walter can't be sure.

Things are easy between them, for all that they have grown up to be so different. Ken _should_ be like the boys who laugh at Walter or think him odd - he is tall and confident and never seems to worry what others think, but when he and Walter are alone, he is the same Ken from childhood - kindred underneath it all.

Their talk turns sometimes to girls - more than tall or confident, Ken has grown handsome, too - Walter can't help but notice it. Ken talks fast about this girl or that girl, and Walter understands and doesn't - or rather, he thinks, he understands Ken, but fears that Ken will never understand him. He offers his own stories - Alice Parker, for some time; he cannot bring himself to mention Faith. Ken mentions kissing, and Walter is quiet, the memory of Pat's lips at the forefront of his mind. He wonders, then, about Ken's lips and that - that is not to be thought of, and he changes the subject quickly.

It scratches at the underside of their friendship, turns moments strange and awkward when they should not be. Walter finds himself unable to look away from Ken's eyes sometimes, finds himself noticing the curve of his mouth when he smiles.

_Stupid_, he thinks to himself at night, when the room feels as though it's closing in on him and he thinks he might choke on the longing. Ken and Faith, Pat and Alice - he doesn't know why he does this to himself. What does it matter, anyway? Walter has not forgotten Pat and the girl; they'll grow up and away and it can't last.

It slips away a little easier - it's only _Ken_, he is the closest friend Walter has outside of his family, and - perhaps it's only the surprise of how handsome Ken has grown, the need for closeness. He is able to laugh at himself, in time, but it does not change the fact that he still thinks of it every now and then.

_5. Paul Irving_

Walter has always admired Paul Irving - poet and scholar, he is everything Walter hopes to be. Nobody ever seems to mock Paul for his sensitivity or his imagination - but then, Paul stands straight in a way that Walter can't quite imitate, has an assuredness about him that Walter only prays will come to him one day.

He does not visit often - he is busy at his home in the States, and sometimes they receive postcards from Europe. Susan sniffs that Mr. Irving has no _right_ to be so busy, really, he has no wife or children - what duties can he possibly have?

He is not too busy to come visit, though, one spring when Walter has finished Queen's. At dinner, Walter tries not to look at him too much, tries not to notice the delicacy of his features, the fine lines of his face, the tapering length of his fingers.

Mother laughs and encourages them to spend time together; they read poetry and take walks in Rainbow Valley. Walter shows him all the places they have named and claimed for their kingdoms and pirates' seas, and Paul listens with an understanding that comes from more than just a shared belief in knights and fairylands - or so Walter hopes when he goes to sleep at night.

On Paul's last day in the Glen, Walter takes him to the spring where only a few have ever sat with him - Di and the minister; Ken, once - and they drink, both silent. Walter does not know what possesses him, only that he feels very sure, in this moment, so he covers Paul's hand with his own.

Paul does not pull away or rebuke him. He looks at Walter for a long moment, reaches out to cup his face with his hand. Strangely, no chill goes through Walter at his touch. Paul's skin is soft and his smile is rueful, and then he takes Walter's hands in his own and says that Walter will find someone, one day - but it cannot be Paul, for there is a man waiting for him in Boston.

Walter shrugs and blushes and resolves to forget about it, but at least there is the relief that he is not alone, not the only one.

When Paul leaves, he grasps Walter's hand in his own - friendly this time - and tells him to take care, eyes boring into him. Walter watches him leave, turns away only when Nan jostles his elbow. And he wants for a while, but it's not enough, a flicker instead of the flame it should be, and it dies quietly.

_(Una Meredith)_

Walter notices her occasionally; whenever Di or Faith give up their place next to him, she is there, shy and unobtrusive in her way. She listens to his spun fancies and mundane reflections alike, sometimes with eyes wide and sometimes falling asleep to some fairytale or another, until Faith or Mary Vance elbows her awake.

He notices her occasionally, but he doesn't think about her much. He has longed for ideals and idols, has always been susceptible to the beautiful and the dramatic, and she is neither. Their paths diverge early; he goes to Queen's and to a schoolhouse in Lowbridge, she moves between the manse and the church and he quite forgets about her, as he falls for people who can never be his. By twenty-two, he thinks he knows what he wants - always something that he cannot have.

He cannot bring himself to enlist when the war breaks out. Instead, he returns to school and hates himself for being a coward - a sentiment it seems his peers share. Walter waits for her letters, takes comfort in her words and her strength when his classmates are cruel. She writes little of her own life, only mentions here and there of the manse, of her own worries and cares. And for the first time, Walter finds himself wondering about Una Meredith.

He finally makes up his mind to go, sits for hours trying to find the words to tell her, even as his letters to Faith and Alice and Ken sit quite finished. He doesn't understand why this is so difficult - Una has sent a brother off already; his parting should not matter - and yet, he feels it does.

At the train station, she tilts her face up to him to say goodbye, offers one pale hand. Walter grasps it in his own, feels the warmth of her skin and suddenly it is not quite enough; he wants to close the distance between them somehow - but he doesn't know how, not when they are surrounded by friends and family, everyone watching him, asking him not to be sentimental.

Still, he cannot quite go, not with only the press of her hand to remember her by, so he leans down to brush his mouth against the corner of hers - only briefly, only friendly; their lips barely touch. It is hardly a kiss, nothing like the way he pressed his lips to Pat's all those summers ago - but still it sparks something strange within him - something longing and wistful, something opposite the heady rush of infatuation.

Of all his memories, he finds himself thinking of this the most - he remembers, at night when the damp and the cold keep him awake, the softness of her mouth under his and the look on her face when he had pulled away. He passes the time wondering - what it would have been like, if her head had turned just enough for him to kiss her fully on the mouth, what she would have felt like in his arms. What could have been, if he had noticed her before, fallen for her from the start, the way Jem had with Faith. If there had been no war. He wonders if Una could care for all of him, as he is. Somehow, he thinks that she would.

But the Piper will pipe - he does not have much longer, Walter knows, and that brings a pang that he has not quite felt before.

He wishes he'd realized sooner.


End file.
